He received a silver watch from the emperor as he graduated at the top of his class at Tokyo Imperial University as an electrical engineer in 1918.

He established Nishina Laboratory at RIKEN in 1931, and invited some Western scholars to Japan including Heisenberg, Dirac and Bohr to stimulate Japanese physicists.

It was also in 1931 that he lectured about the Dirac theory in Kyoto, which was where he met and was attended by Hideki Yukawa and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga.

[4] On 7 August 1945, Nishina led a team of scientists sent by the Japanese high command to confirm whether or not Hiroshima was attacked with an atomic bomb.

Asked to vet Nishina by US intelligence officers, Kelly took the file home and made his assessment: “He was an international scholar, respected all over the world.

In particular, he detected what turned out to be the muon in cosmic rays, independently of Anderson et al.[3] He also discovered the uranium-237 isotope and pioneered the studies of symmetric fission phenomena occurring upon fast neutron irradiation of uranium (1939–1940), and narrowly missed out on the discovery of the first transuranic element, neptunium.

[12] He was a principal investigator of RIKEN and mentored generations of physicists, including two Nobel Laureates: Hideki Yukawa and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga.